The idea behind “la Guitare à crayon” is to be able to paint and play music with the same instrument (crayon mean pencil in english). It’s a custom usb guitar with open source software: namely, pure data (for sound) and gimp, blender, flash (for visual).

This is an admittedly mad project to see what might have happened if Sony had invented the Walkman earlier than they did – and made it so it took 8 track tape cartridges (which came before cassette tapes were invented).

In other words, can I make a personal 8 track player with just headphones in the style of a Walkman?

Palalab is offering free multi-instrumental sample loops in a variety of styles designed to be different, inspire your songwriting and fill out your mix. All loops can be used royalty-free, are properly ACID™ized for quality pitch and tempo transposition, and loop seamlessly.

Every week Palalab posts a new sample pack consisting of 5 loops. Each pack stays up for 4 weeks only, so be sure to bookmark this page and check back regularly.

The KORG nanoSERIES has a rabid following among many Ableton Live users, and with good reason. The nanoPAD and nanoKONTROL street for about US$60, provide basic knobs + faders + transport (KONTROL) and pads and X/Y control (PAD), plus a fully-featured, cross-platform editor, but still fit in a backpack. They’re small enough to use in coach on an airplane.

Having to open Live templates, however, just to get the mappings you want is a big pain. So, instead I’ve created a basic set of MIDI Remote Scripts and Kontrol Editor templates for Mac and Windows, Live 6.x and later, and wanted to share them with you.

# Gijs Gieskes WalkSX – The Walkman has a audio recording of some sort, on one side.. (L) And a audio signal that is used to trigger the arduino sequencer on the other side (R), that sequences the Gakken SX-150.

Jon @ Audio Geek Zine takes a look at what phase is and how to avoid problems with it in your productions.

Phase is a constant concern for recording and mixing engineers. Problems with phase can ruin your music, they can be easily avoided or corrected, but first you need understand how these problems occur.

This guide will attempt to explain almost everything there is to know about phase, what it is, how it happens, what it can sound like and some techniques to deal with it.

# Samples | synthesizers.se – Bunch of free samples including some REX'es of the Yamaha MP-1 and a ReFill featuring Mario Paint sounds.